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Adobe Creative Suite 4 has been out for a while, and it's been widely praised, not the least by us. It's a great piece of softwareprovided you've got the hardware to run it. That got me thinking: If money were no object, what would the ultimate CS4 system be? Well, by lucky coincidence, I work in a lab equipped to answer just that type of question. So I set out to build a PC that would wring the maximum benefit out of Adobe's powerful multimedia suite.

Given that CS4 and Open GL go together like chocolate and peanut butter, I decided on a gaming motherboard that could support Open GL. Enabling it gives the smooth pan-and-zoom features that allow CS4 power users to get the most out of graphics-intensive apps like Photoshop. Since we're looking for the ultimate system, I grabbed our current favorite mobo, the $240 (street) ASUS P6T and popped in the top-of-the-line 3.2-GHz Intel Core i7 965 Extreme processor ($1,075 street).

The motherboard, in addition to being a stellar performer, has an eSATA port, which lets you quickly upload large files to an external drive you can take with you. That's an especially important capability with HD video and large images, since the files are extremely difficult to send via e-mail. You'll often be putting them on an external drive, and you don't want to be waiting all night for the data transfer to complete.

For the all-important graphics processing, I swung for the fences and installed the Nvidia Quadro CX. Make no mistake, this is a workstation card meant for serious graphics professionals, and it's priced accordinglyaround 1,500 bucks on the street. But to the heavy CS4 user, the Quadro CX is worth every pennyit acts as a finely tuned accelerator for Photoshop and Premiere.

Nothing illustrates that better than the card's Nvidia CUDA plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4: It makes video encoding as much as four times as fast as an onboard graphics processor and a standard dual-core CPU, and that can translate into hours saved on each video project. In Photoshop, the card's 10-bit color fidelity lets you work in the broadest color range, and the 8K-by-8K texture rendering allows you the highest possible resolution. So maybe you don't need this kind of power every day: It's like the sixth gear in a Ferrari, there when you need it.

If you're going to be working with large files in Premiere and you plan to distribute your work on optical media, you'll definitely need the capacity of Blu-ray media. The drive I chose for creating that media, the $230 (street) Lite-On BD (DH-4B1s), lets you burn up to 25GB of data per disc.

For storage, I went with the 150GB Western Digital WD VelociRaptor HD ($150 street), because I've had good luck with these drives in the past. But as long as you go with a SATA device, which provides speedy data transfers, you can really choose any drive that has enough capacity.

Once I'd chosen all my hardware, I needed to pick the right OS to power it. The common perception is that the Mac is the designer's darling. But with CS4, Windows users have an advantage: The only 64-bit version of CS4 is for Windows. Mac users are out of luck until CS5, even though Mac OS 10.5 is 64-bit. Why does this matter? Because 64-bit Windows Vista Ultimate can address up to 128GB of RAM, whereas 32-bit programs and OSs (like XP) max out at 4GB. I picked Windows Vista Ultimate ($319.95 direct) because Vista Home and Premium max out at 8GB and 16GB, respectively, of addressable RAM.

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Since I went to the trouble of getting 64-bit Windows, it was only reasonable that I load up on RAM. A killer CS4 machine should have at least 8GB of RAM. Yes, you could get by with less, but memory gives you the biggest bang for the buck of any hardware buy. With all the investments we're making in heavy-duty components, it's senseless to skimp here. If you're going to edit video in HD formats, the extra capacity makes a huge difference. And, because I chose Vista Ultimate, I can always expand. I chose Kingston DDR3 KVR1333D3N9K2/4G modules ($69 direct per pair of 2GB modules) because their value-priced memory is just as good as other manufacturers' higher-priced memory. I got more bang for my buck and spent the money I saved on a cool accessory: the Wacom Intuos4 pen tablet.

However powerful the components, of course, they won't do much good without a place to mount them and a way to power them. To satisfy the first requirement, I looked to the $80 (street) Apevia X-Telstar, a well-designed enclosure, with easy-to-load drive bays. I also think it's pretty slick looking, and, to my mind, the way a top-of-the-line design ought to look. And since I've collected some pretty power-hungry hardware, I chose the 650W Corsair TX650 to supply the juice. This PSU is solid and reliable, and I've used it before in a few different builds, so I know it'll keep the power flowing to all my high-end equipment.

I'd assembled some $4K worth of killer gear. The next step was putting it all together. What follows is step-by-step instructions, complete with photographs to illustrate the process.Next: Steps 1-4 >

About the Author

Dan Evans is the DIY Analyst for PCMag.com. He has been at the magazine/website for over 10 years and during that tenure has worked on every product team here. When he is not building a PC from scratch he is reviewing laptops, desktops, and videogames. Before coming to PCMag.com he earned a BA in US History at Columbia University and was a membe... See Full Bio

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